22 November 2012 9:36 PM

The real news that's coming from the war between Hamas and Israel

Once again, here’s yet more information about the war
between Hamas and Israel that unaccountably you may not have come across in
today’s UK mainstream media.

Peace in our
time!

On BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning, I heard a
correspondent say that most Israelis were ‘relieved’ by the ceasefire in Gaza. I
also heard a news bulletin which said the truce had ‘largely held’ overnight.
'Largely held'? That’s not what they thought in the south of Israel, as they
dived for shelter throughout the evening during which between 12 and 20 rockets
were fired at them from Gaza. Can you imagine what the BBC would have said had
Israel launched just one unprovoked air-strike after the cease-fire deadline!
But when it’s the Palestinians breaching the cease-fire, this is airbrushed out
of the BBC picture.

Yes, Israeli families are immensely relieved that their
children will not now have to go into Gaza in house-to-house battles that would
have claimed many of their lives. And of course people are relieved to have
some respite from the rockets, however short that may prove to be.

But some 70 per cent of Israelis, according to polling
figures, were against the ceasefire - sorry, according to Israeli Defence
Minister Ehud Barak, ‘document of understandings’. They are also now anxious
that, with the Hamas having only agreed to stop rocket fire, human bomb attacks
will now return to Israel’s buses and cafes. Because one way or another, Israel
remains under daily threat from the Palestinians who do indeed target civilians,
and even more particularly young Israelis, for mass murder.

Israelis are battle-hardened, stoical and realistic.
Most believe that any military action in Gaza, on the ground or not, can only
ever gain a period of respite by destroying so much of its terrorist infrastructure
that it takes time to rebuild it. Those who were against the cease-fire thought
that only through a ground invasion could enough damage be done to that
infrastructure at the very least to achieve a reasonable respite.

But now many are deeply uneasy, not merely that this
was not achieved and that in a few weeks or months Israel may once again be
massing on the Gaza border with the rockets flying, and now with Hamas much
stronger and with Israel’s own credibility greatly weakened. Look at what a Palestinian
Authority official told Ha’aretz
(£) :

‘Hamas has no regrets over the destruction in Gaza. On
the contrary, Hamas gets a great deal of economic and political benefit from
the terrible destruction because of the large donations that will come from the
world and the political image of the organization that stands on the front line
against Israel.’

Many Israelis are also aghast and incredulous that,
through this ceasefire, Obama has given the Muslim Brotherhood – of which
Hamas is its terrorist wing – the task of guaranteeing Israel’s security
against not just rocket fire but the smuggling of weapons. Egypt’s President
Morsi is not just a Muslim Brother but is also in cahoots with Iran – the
principal source of the rockets and ammunition to Gaza, which have been
smuggled in through... Egypt. The fox is now in charge of the hen-coop.

Indeed, it is likely that the Obama administration’s
main concern here was not to help secure the safety of Israel but to help
bolster its protégé Morsi in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood in the region –
because heaven help us all, the Obama administration regards the Brotherhood (whose
goal is the Islamisation of the west) as ‘moderate’ and thus a suitable buffer
against the west’s Islamist foes. Go figure. Accordingly, it is reaching out to
them at home as well as in the Middle East (but that’s another, no less
terrifying, story.)

In this
Spectator article, Douglas Murray points out how the Brotherhood is now
spreading its tentacles across the region, with terrifying long-term consequences
for the west from this longest game in the world.

True, Morsi is presiding over a country at risk of
starvation and is thus unlikely to do anything to jeopardise America’s annual
$3 billion aid package to Egypt. But that didn’t stop him turning a blind eye
to the weapons being transported from Iran to Gaza through Sinai; nor the
jihadis flowing through Sinai to help their brothers in Gaza murder more
Israelis.

As is the Brotherhood’s hallmark, Morsi is a canny operator who
proceeds not in a straight line but by zigzagging to achieve his goals. So he
surely reckons he can hang onto his US aid and fool the Americans into
believing that he is holding the line against the Hamas. And since the Obama
administration will pretend that that is what he is doing, the Brothers will
tighten the pincer on Israel, the brave but besieged and now almost totally
surrounded chicken in the coop.

Blood libel
against the most moral army in the world

The most startling fact about Israel’s performance in
the eight days’ war in Gaza is the one about which the most egregious lie is
being told by western commentators. This is the astoundingly low proportion of Palestinian
civilian casualties.

That total is a tiny number of deaths from 1500 air
strikes. It also means 57 civilians were killed along with the 120 terrorists.
That is a ratio of more than two terrorists for every civilian killed. When you
consider that in Afghanistan the ratio was threecivilians for
every one combatant killed, and in Iraq it was four civilians for every
one combatant killed, you can see just what a staggering feat of precision the
Israelis achieved. This is even more astonishing given that the Hamas situated
their rockets and ammunitions in the middle of civilian areas.

This precision was acknowledged yesterday by American
journalist Anderson Cooper, who was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer of CNN after Cooper
arrived in Israel from Gaza.

Acknowledging that some people would disagree, Cooper
said that it was very clear that the IDF clearly knew exactly what it was
targeting. Palestinians knew it, too, he said: some of them would go outside to
watch and even photograph the attacks, because they knew they were not either
the targets or the object of indiscriminate fire. The bottom line was that the
Israelis were making clear efforts to hit only military targets.

And the reason for that was that they were trying as
hard as they possibly could to avoid hitting civilians. No other army in the
world goes to such lengths to avoid civilian casualties. Yet no other army in
the world is accused by western commentators, as is the IDF, of targeting not
just civilians but babies and children – or at the very least, exhibiting a
total indifference to the fact that their air-strikes are killing them.

Reliable figures for the number of children killed do
not yet appear to have been published (and such figures are in any event
problematic, since the Palestinians use teenagers for terrorist activities).
However, UNICEF
(no friend of Israel) says that 22 children were killed in the Israeli air
strikes. That’s 22 too many – but it’s still 22 out of 177. Given that more
than half of Gaza’s population are children, this again underscores the fact
that the Israelis were going to great lengths to avoid hitting them. Yet western commentators have grotesquely
smeared the Israelis as child-killers.

Amongst those who credulously believe what they see and
hear reported about Gaza – in the UK on the BBC, Sky and Channel Four News in
particular - this modern blood-libel not surprisingly rouses them to
passionate hatred of Israel. The broadcasters have played a particularly
appalling role in this because, notwithstanding the tiny number of child
casualties relative to the huge number of air-strikes and the preponderance of
terrorists on the casualty list, the BBC, Sky and Channel Four News have been
dwelling on distressing footage of the children who were killed. They have thus
given the entirely false impression that the number of children killed was very
large, and that the Israelis are heartless brutes.

Given that from past experience inflammatory media
coverage of Israel’s wars produces a leap in Jew-hatred in Britain and physical
attacks on Jews, it seems to me that such dishonest coverage is not just a
gross abuse of broadcasters’ responsibility but also constitutes indirect
incitement to racial hatred. I believe therefore that this should be raised in
Parliament as a matter of urgency.

‘What has shocked me most over the last eight days -
during which I have reported exclusively from Gaza, with BBC colleagues
complementing in Israel - is the appallingly high number of children killed and
injured.’

‘Appallingly high’. That’s 22 out of 177. He went on:

‘If the events of the last week (and 2006 and 2008-9)
are not to be repeated, a lasting ceasefire is paramount and a permanent
solution to improving the daily lives of more the one and a half million Gazans
must be put into place.

‘It is a destructive cycle. After previous conflicts,
it went something like this: Gaza would be allowed to rebuild its institutions
and infrastructure; but, with time, as people became increasingly frustrated
with the Israeli blockade, Palestinian militants would fire more and more
rockets into Israel; Israel would respond with overwhelming military force, and
much of what had been built up was destroyed.’

So for this BBC correspondent, the ‘destructive cycle’
is of course Israel’s fault. The Hamas attacks are caused by ‘frustration with
the blockade’. But of course the blockade is only there because of the
murderous attacks by Hamas. There is no cycle. There is Hamas aggression and
Israeli defence.

And as for this Israeli ‘blockade’ – what blockade?
Israel restricts certain goods from coming in, for sure, but only on security
grounds; it actually allows in a huge amount of humanitarian supplies as well
as goods for trade. It is Egypt which tends to keep its border with Gaza
sealed; yet mysteriously the Hamas isn’t firing rockets at Cairo.

Duh! Why are such BBC
journalists incapable of seeing that what they write about Israel makes so
little sense? And such reporting can have lethal consequences.

The collusion
by the west in Hamas aggression

Col Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in
Afghanistan, has told the Algemeiner:

‘There is a very effective anti-Israel propaganda
machine and there has been for some time. It’s partly from the Palestinians,
partly from other Arab states and many people in the West - from Europe in
particular but also the United States - see Hamas as the underdog and Israel as
the bully and their natural inclination is to side with the underdog; but it’s
to misunderstand the reality: Hamas is not a small group of lone freedom
fighters. Hamas is a terrorist organization supported, financed and directed by
Iran. Israel on the other hand is not a bully. It has shown amazing
restraint - far more restraint than most other countries would show in the face
of this sort of provocation.

‘I think some of the governments, diplomats and
international NGOs now circling around this issue should shoulder some of the
blame for this current conflict. They ignored year after year terrorist missile
attacks and they’ve not made any effort to restrain Hamas. So yes, there’s
certainly a culpability far wider than just in the immediate region.’

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Mr. Greenwood,
You haven't heard it from the BBC, but from an authoritative and independent source...the..erm...IDF. (Show me an army that doesn't lie through its teeth as a matter of course.) As with any farce, if you pull at any one loose thread here the whole thing unravels.

"Colonel Richard Kemp" is not some independent authority on military matters but a well known Israel supporter and dinner guest at the Zionist Federation of Great Britain annual dinner. He also admitted in an interview with the BBC Hardtalk programme. "I have never been to Gaza and have no direct knowledge of the situation there".

Douglas Murray runs a think tank the "Henry Jackson Society" which recently merged with a pro-Israel propoganda outfit. He is also on record as fabricating the content of speeches by Iranian leaders to justify his organisation's support for an attack on Iran.

Wolf Blitzer of CNN is also a convinced Israel supporter and Zionist. There is an interesting item on Youtube where he is in debate with Norman Finkelstein on the Israel/Palestine conflict and shows clearly where his sympathies lie.

The IDF is not a reliable source on casualty figures. If they say "only" 22 children were killled the true figure is certainly higher. What's more if it were 22 Israeli Jewish children I don't think Melanie Phillips would be quite so blase.

In all the time I watched and listened to BBC journalists over the course of their reporting on Gaza, I don't think I ever heard them say that 120 terrorists had been killed by Israel. Instead, I only ever heard them say that over 150 'people' had been killed. This is true, but it's also double speak deception.

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